Holocaust trivialization is one among various categories of Holocaust distortion. It is a tool for some ideologically or politically motivated activists to metaphorically compare phenomena they oppose to the industrial-scale destruction of the Jews in World War II by Germans, Austrians, and their allies. Examples include environmental problems, abortion, the slaughter of animals, the use of tobacco, and human rights abuses.

Those abusing Holocaust comparisons for their ideological purposes want to exaggerate the evil nature of a phenomenon they condemn. With the Holocaust symbolizing absolute evil for many, they use it as an instrument for their purposes.

Holocaust trivialization manifests itself partly in the growing use of language concerning a large number of disparate events that have no connection to genocide. Other trivializers operate out of commercial or artistic considerations.

Unlike in the case of most other distortions of the Holocaust, the trivializers usually do not target Jews.

Holocaust distortion has been increasing in recent years. It manifests itself in a great variety of manipulations of history.1 Among the best known are Holocaust denial,2 Holocaust depreciation, and Holocaust inversion3-the portraying of Israel, Israelis, and Jews as Nazis. Most of these distortions aim at harming Jews or Israel.

Holocaust trivialization is a tool for some ideologically or politically motivated activists to metaphorically compare phenomena they oppose to the industrial-scale destruction of the Jews in World War II by Germans, Austrians, and their allies. Examples include environmental problems, abortion, the slaughter of animals, the use of tobacco, and human rights abuses. None of these bear any fundamental resemblance to the manmade genocide of the 1940s.

Those who abuse Holocaust comparisons for their ideological purposes wish to exaggerate the evil nature of a phenomenon they condemn. With the Holocaust symbolizing absolute evil for many, they use it as an instrument for their purposes and thus abuse the centrality of the Holocaust discourse in contemporary society. The perceived evil to which they compare the Holocaust, however, does not share its major characteristics. These include the systematic defamation, exclusion, torturing, and destruction of specific people in a society. Another element is that all belonging to this category are targeted. Trivialization goes beyond hurting the sensitivities of Jews, by abusing the memory of the murdered victims as well.

Holocaust trivialization also manifests itself partly in the growing use of comparisons of disparate events to elements bearing no resemblance to the Holocaust. Many trivializers operate out of commercial or artistic considerations; others are just insensitive.

Distortions Overlap

Several Holocaust distortions overlap. Comparisons of current wars, specific actions, or individuals to Nazi actions or leaders should be treated as a separate category, namely, postwar Holocaust equivalence. Examples are comparisons of U.S. presidents such as Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush to Hitler, or of the actions of the United States and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan to those of Nazi Germany.

The Holocaust-equivalence category encompasses a broad range of other incidents. In early 2008 Daniel Hannan, a British Conservative Member of the European Parliament, said there that the powers given the Parliament’s president reminded him of the tactics used by the Nazi government of Germany to govern without parliamentary consent.4

As aforementioned, among the better-known ideological or political causes of the trivializers are, for instance, environmentalism, animal rights or pro-life activism, the stopping of smoking, or human rights abuses. What binds the heterogeneous perpetrators of Holocaust trivialization together is their methods.

These distortions and others led Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel to write as early as 1988:

I cannot use [the word Holocaust] anymore. First, because there are no words, and also because it has become so trivialized that I cannot use it anymore. Whatever mishap occurs now, they call it “holocaust.” I have seen it myself in television in the country in which I live. A commentator describing the defeat of a sports team, somewhere, called it a “holocaust.” I have read in a very prestigious newspaper published in California, a description of the murder of six people, and the author called it a holocaust. So, I have no words anymore.5

The trivializing comparisons to the Holocaust are rarely elaborated on. This manipulation differs in its mode of distorting from Holocaust denial, in part because the trivializers do not target Jews and also because it rarely develops any detailed arguments about the Holocaust. One hardly sees statements explaining what the defining elements of the Holocaust were and how the phenomenon metaphorically compared to it has all or most of the same components.

This characteristic of the manipulation is due to the fact that the desired effect is achieved mainly by the abusive mention of the Holocaust. The manipulation is therefore relatively easy to expose, by pointing out that crucial criminal components of the Holocaust are lacking in what is being compared to it.

A consideration of some examples of trivialization, and reactions to them, indicates both the manipulative character of this distortion and how it can be deconstructed.

The Environmental Holocaust

Environmentalists are one group among which Holocaust trivializers are found. They often regard global warming as the main contemporary threat to humanity. Ellen Goodman, a Boston Globe columnist, wrote that it is no longer possible to deny global warming. She invoked the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which claimed it was 90 percent certain that global warming was the result of human activity.

From there she moved on: “I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.”6

Well-known talk-show host Dennis Prager responded by castigating Goodman’s statement. He first noted that it reflected the fact that most people on the Left see “their ideological adversaries as bad people.” On the other hand, “those on the Right tend to view their adversaries as wrong, perhaps even dangerous, but not usually as bad.”

It might be inconceivable to Goodman, Prager observed, that one could disagree with global warming forecasts without evil motives. He further asserted that contemporary liberalism would tend to question the moral authority of Judeo-Christian religions or of any secular conservative authority, but not of “any other authority” such as the United Nations.

Prager also pointed out that “If questioning global warming is on ‘a par’ with questioning the Holocaust, how bad can questioning the Holocaust really be?” He added that while liberal and left-wing organizations had agreed with Goodman’s statements, none had condemned her Holocaust comparison. Prager concluded that Goodman’s assertion marked the “beginning of what is becoming one of the largest campaigns of vilification of decent people in history-the global condemnation of…anyone who questions global warming.”7

Many others abuse the Holocaust to promote environmental aims. Bob Burnett, who defines himself as a writer, activist, and Quaker, claimed in an attack on a televangelist who had written about the dirty politics of the “environmental movement” that “It took less than ten years for Nazi anti-Semitism to produce the death of six million European Jews. How long will it take for the effects of global climate change to result in similar loss of life?”8

It is similarly easy to claim that many people in the world die as a result of poor health, malnourishment, and inappropriate diets. Given today’s societal mood we may well read one day about the “diet Holocaust” or the “hamburger Holocaust.”

Al Gore

Comparing potential ecological disaster to the Holocaust is not a new phenomenon. On 19 March 1989, the then senator from Tennessee, Al Gore, published an op-ed in the New York Times titled “An Ecological Kristallnacht. Listen.” Gore called upon all humankind to heed the warning: “…the evidence is as clear as the sounds of glass shattering in Berlin.”9

In 2007 Gore, by then a Nobel Laureate and former vice-president, continued to use Holocaust imagery for environmental purposes. As part of his advocacy, twice in December 2007, he criticized many world leaders for ignoring the threat of climate change in the same way that former British prime minister Chamberlain and other world leaders had ignored the dangers posed by Hitler. Gore voiced the same sentiments as almost two decades earlier: “Once again world leaders waffle, hoping the danger will dissipate.”

Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May justified Gore’s remarks, explaining: “It’s not a literal comparison that says somehow climate change is like Hitler. Climate change is not like Hitler. Hitler is an individual who managed to construct a political party and then, through democratic elections, a nation that was prepared to go along with genocide. This is not like that. But the moral failure of those who stand by-that’s the comparison.”

A representative of an umbrella organization for Canadian Jewish groups responded that May’s statements supported positions that were “obscene and absolutely unnecessary” for anyone, even Gore.10

Opponents of Environmental Measures

Opponents of environmental measures sometimes also refer abusively to the Holocaust. In 2004 Andrei Illarionov, an economic adviser to President Putin, recommended that Russia should not sign the Kyoto Protocol, which he called a death pact that would “strangle economic growth and economic activity in countries that accept the protocol’s requirements.” He likened the protocol to Auschwitz.11

Glenn Beck, a television and radio host and author, compared Gore’s campaign against global warming to elements of the Holocaust, saying: “Al Gore’s not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them; it is the same tactic however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. The goal is global carbon tax. The goal is the United Nations running the world.”

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) denounced Beck’s remarks and said they were part of “a troubling epidemic on the airwaves, where comparisons to Hitler and the Holocaust are becoming all-too facile.” The ADL’s national director Abraham Foxman asserted: “Glenn Beck’s linkage of Hitler’s plan to round up and exterminate Jews with Al Gore’s efforts to raise awareness of global warming is outrageous, insensitive, and deeply offensive.”12

The Abortion Holocaust

Abortion opponents have probably mobilized the best-known distorters of the Holocaust. One of these was Pope John Paul II who, in his 2005 book Memory and Identity, compared abortion to the Holocaust. He wrote that both abortion and the murder of six million Jews were the result of humans under the guise of democracy usurping the “law of God.”13

Then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, claimed at the launching of the Pope’s book that the Pope was not equating abortion with the Holocaust.14

In another incident involving the Catholic Church, the Archbishop of Cologne in Germany, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, “provoked much unrest when he put women who had had an abortion in a row with mass murderers like Hitler, Stalin and Herod. He compares abortion to the Holocaust and the abortion pill with Zyklon B, the gas used by the Nazis in the extermination camps.”

Condemnation came even from groups that some may have expected to be supportive. The ecumenical movement Initiative Kirche told the press, “Meisner has completely lost his authority as a bishop and has publicly done a great wrong to the Catholic Church and to dialogue between Jews and Christians.”

Paul Spiegel, the then president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said the cardinal had insulted the millions of victims of the Holocaust. He added that “The Catholic Church does not understand or does not want to understand that there is an enormous difference between mass genocide and what women do with their bodies.” Spiegel also linked the Pope’s remarks to the earlier statements by Cardinal Meisner.15

Jim Hughes of the International Right to Life Federation told LifeSiteNews.com, “In today’s relativistic times, it seems the only evil which still touches people whose hearts have grown cold are the atrocities of Hitler. The comparison not only fits like a glove, but is necessary to bring people out of their blissfully ignorant slumber.”16 On many other occasions abortion and other phenomena have been compared to genocide and mass murder, rather than specifically to the Holocaust.

The Associated Press reported that “Displays of bloody fetuses next to pictures of the collapsing World Trade Center, a black lynching victim hanging from a tree and corpses at a concentration camp were among the disturbing billboards at the University of New Hampshire put up by a national anti-abortion group, the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform.”17 These billboards liken the genocide of the Holocaust to abortion and victims of 9/11 and racism.

In 2007, during the Republican primaries for the upcoming presidential elections, contender Mike Huckabee linked abortion to the Holocaust in a conference hosted by the Family Research Council. He said: “sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our work force…. It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our work force had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.”18

The Animal Holocaust

One category of Holocaust trivialization that has gained much publicity is comparing the slaughter of animals to the murder of Jews in the Holocaust. It is here that one finds the most detailed and perverse attempts at comparison to the Holocaust. One well-known author who compared Jewish suffering to the promotion of animal rights is the South African-born Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee, who is a vegetarian.

He wrote about the Holocaust:

Of course we cried out in horror when we found out what they had been up to. What a terrible crime to treat human beings like cattle-if we had only known beforehand. But our cry should more accurately have been: What a terrible crime to treat human beings like units in an industrial process. And that cry should have had a postscript: What a terrible crime-come to think of it, a crime against nature-to treat any living being like a unit in an industrial process.19

Much attention was garnered by the exhibition “Holocaust on your Plate” by the animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The Guardian wrote that the exhibition

juxtaposes harrowing images of people in concentration camps with disturbing pictures of animals on farms. One photograph showing an emaciated man is next to another of a starving cow. Another shows a pile of naked human beings, next to a shot of a heap of pig carcasses…. Other images compare children behind barbed wire with a picture of pigs looking out from behind bars; crowds of people, with cattle being herded into transports; and people crammed into bunks, with chickens in a battery farm.20

PETA founder and director Ingrid Newkirk said: “People in their own time can look back and they can so readily condemn the atrocities of the past.”21 Additionally, PETA representative Mark Prescott wrote in a released statement: “The very same mind-set that made the Holocaust possible-that we can do anything we want to those we decide are ‘different or inferior’-is what allows us to commit atrocities against animals every single day.” Prescott went on to note that members of his family were murdered in the Holocaust.22

Many attacked the PETA campaign and advertisements. Foxman stated,

The effort by PETA to compare the deliberate systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent. PETA’s effort to seek “approval” for their “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign is outrageous, offensive and takes chutzpah to new heights.

…Abusive treatment of animals should be opposed, but cannot and must not be compared to the Holocaust. The uniqueness of human life is the moral underpinning for those who resisted the hatred of Nazis and others ready to commit genocide even today.23

Finally Newkirk, on behalf of PETA, apologized, writing,

Our mission is a profoundly human one at its heart, yet we know that we have caused pain. This was never our intention, and we are deeply sorry. We hope that you can understand that although we embarked on the “Holocaust on Your Plate” project with misconceptions about what its impact would be, we always try to act with integrity, with the goal of improving the lives of those who suffer.24

Yet Newkirk had already claimed in 1983 that animals were similar to humans, stating: “A rat is a pig is a boy” and “Six million people died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses.”25

In response to the “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign, Roberta Kalechofsky, a vegetarian and animal rights activist for more than twenty years, published the booklet Animal Suffering and the Holocaust: The Problem with Comparisons. She is the founder of Jews for Animal Rights (JAR) and has published numerous articles on the topic of animal suffering from various perspectives. In this booklet she explores animal suffering relative to that of the Holocaust and remarks:

There is no proof that the flesh of a burning human being is hotter than the flesh of a burning animal. We may think so because the human race has left a record of its suffering, and the animals have not. They have lived their pain, in secret places, with little trace on human consciousness. The human gifts of language and writing-in short, of history-have brought for us greater attention and consciousness of our suffering, while animal suffering is barely accorded knowledge. It is history which separates animal suffering from the Holocaust.26

Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer had one of his fictional characters, Herman Gombiner, say in the story “The Letter Writer” that toward animals all humans are Nazis, and for animals every day is Treblinka. Karen Davis, who runs a sanctuary for chickens, makes a lengthy case for comparing animal suffering to the Holocaust. It contains one of the most perverse attacks on the memory of Holocaust victims, while referring to poultry:

The methods of the Holocaust exist today in the form of factory farming where billions of innocent, feeling beings are taken from their families, trucked hundreds of miles through all weather extremes, confined in cramped, filthy conditions, and herded to their deaths. During the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children died from heat exhaustion, dehydration, starvation or from freezing to the sides of cattle cars. Those who arrived at the concentration camps alive were forced into cramped bunkers where they lived on top of other dead victims, covered in their own feces and urine.27

A similar type of Holocaust trivialization is expressed by Charles Patterson, who according to his online biography is a social historian and a graduate of the Yad Vashem Institute for Holocaust Education.28 In his book Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, he argues that “A holocaust occurs while meat eaters turn the other way, denying that such horrors could possibly exist. Were the German and Polish people who knew the fate of those trucked to Buchenwald and Treblinka any less moral or guilty than those who comprehend the truth about what really happens to farm animals?”29

In essence, these animal rights supporters who trivialize the Holocaust need first to humanize animals so as to develop their flawed discourse.

The Nuclear Holocaust

The aforementioned modes of Holocaust trivialization reflect attitudes that have permeated public discourse to some extent. Three other, less frequently mentioned categories are: the use of nuclear bombs, smoking, and alleged transgressions of international human rights laws.

Nuclear bombing is probably the one threat that comes closest in its effects to the Holocaust though still lacking many of its elements. Probably the best-known use of the expression “nuclear holocaust” was President George W. Bush’s statement in 2007 that Iran’s nuclear program threatened to put “a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear Holocaust.”30

The expression “nuclear holocaust” has long been in use. The BBC noted that, already in the 1960s at the then Scottish Office, “the somewhat apocalyptic question of how to bury all the dead after a nuclear holocaust, and who would be responsible was at the centre of a flurry of memos and meetings.”31 In 2002, the BBC reported that during American-South Korean military exercises the North Koreans responded that “the drills were preparations to launch a ‘nuclear holocaust’ on the peninsula.”32

Tobacco and Human Rights Comparisons

Another abusive use of the term Holocaust is the “tobacco Holocaust” developed by Michael Rabinoff in his book, Ending the Tobacco Holocaust: How Big Tobacco Affects Our Health, Pocketbook, and Political Freedom, and What We Can Do About It. The author discusses the horrors of tobacco noting that, according to the World Health Organization, one billion people will die from smoking in this century.33

The comparison is abusive because the damages of smoking result from voluntary actions that people inflict upon themselves; it thus misses the main element of the Holocaust-that it was imposed on the victims by others.

In 2005, Prof. F. Rüter of Amsterdam University said the United States’ treatment of the prisoners in Guantánamo resembled the Nazis’ treatment of those they detained. Needless to say, if that were true many, if not most, of the prisoners would have been dead by the time the Dutch academic made this statement, let alone by now.34

In 2005, U.S. Democratic Senator Richard J. Durbin compared the alleged abuse of prisoners at Guantánamo to techniques used by “the Nazis, the Soviets and Khmer Rouge.” Under strong Republican attack, he apologized in particular to Holocaust victims and U.S. troops.35

Miscellaneous

There are also more isolated examples of Holocaust trivialization that get media attention because they are made by individuals with public visibility. One such case was when Representative Steve King (R-IA) asserted in 2006 that “illegal immigrants are responsible for the deaths of 25 Americans a day through drug trafficking, drunk driving and sex crimes.”

He added that this was a “slow-motion Holocaust,” and was criticized by both the National Jewish Democratic Council and the ADL. Foxman wrote to King: “Your reference to a ‘slow-motion Holocaust’ demonstrates a profound lack of understanding about the nature and the magnitude of the crimes against humanity undertaken by Hitler and his regime.”36

That same year Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele equated the science involved in embryonic stem cell research with the Nazi experimentation on Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust. He made this comment after being asked about embryonic stem cell research at a meeting with the Baltimore Jewish Council.37 Steele apologized after he was criticized by the Jewish community and various politicians.38

Sometimes prominent figures trivialize the Holocaust by applying it to a particular situation. One person who made light of the Holocaust and was well aware that he was breaking a taboo was former French Socialist prime minister Michel Rocard. He remarked that he and his followers in the Socialist Party said among themselves that, in the party, they were “like those wearing the yellow star” and “this comparison may be repugnant but it describes the atmosphere well.”39

Commercial Trivialization

Holocaust images have crossed into additional realms outside of politics and history such as the fashion world, advertising, and general merchandising. Several examples are notable in both the Western and the Muslim world.

Cafepress.com is an American online marketplace with 2.5 million members offering “unique merchandise across virtually every topic.”40 In 2006, this retailer carried products advertised as “Auschwitz souvenir T-shirts.” One example of these T-shirts included the message: “My grandparents went to Auschwitz…and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.” Across the shirt were the infamous words “Arbeit macht frei” from the entrance gate to Auschwitz. After the ADL contacted cafepress.com, the offensive items were removed.41

Zara is a Spanish flagship clothing-chain company with over a thousand stores, including branches in Israel. In fall 2006, a handbag with a swastika design was sold in their stores but, after complaints, the company removed it. Esprit, an apparel manufacturer headquartered in Germany, carried jackets with swastikas imprinted on the buttons. The company stated that it was an error of production and recalled the jackets and the catalogs carrying pictures of this product.42

Although both these firms withdrew their offensive products, the fact that such incidents still occur in major companies reveals a widespread modern-day insensitivity toward anti-Semitic imagery.

An Indian furniture dealer used swastikas and the title “NAZI collection” as part of a bedspread design. In reaction, the Indian Jewish community announced that it would file a suit against the company. The company said it had no intention of insensitivity toward Jews, that NAZI stood for “New Arrival Zone for India,” and that the swastika was originally an ancient Hindu symbol that was appropriated by the Nazis.43

Nazi symbols and Hitler icons can be found around the world in apparel, restaurants, bars, and as separate items for sale-a global indicator of the phenomenon of Holocaust trivialization for monetary gain. Although there are too many examples to list them all, these include a Nazi chess set for sale in a market in Istanbul, Turkey;44 a South Korean Nazi-themed bar;45 and swastika-print garments worn in London’s trendy Soho neighborhood.46

Advertising

Images of the Holocaust have crossed over into marketing and advertising all over the world. An advertisement for Solo Mobile, a wireless division of Bell Canada that was featured in fifty-one locations around Toronto and Vancouver, Canada, depicted a woman wearing a series of buttons.47 One of the buttons read: “Belsen was a gas.” It referred to a contentious song by the Sex Pistols about Bergen-Belsen, a German concentration camp. These advertisements first went up at Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and were removed after the controversial images were brought to the attention of Bell Canada.48

After receiving complaints from the Jewish community, a pizza chain in New Zealand, Hell Pizza, removed billboards of a cartoon Hitler holding a slice of their pizza and saluting.49 Kirk MacGibbon of the Auckland-based advertising agency said: “[We] thought that people would be able to see a funny side to a guy doing a ‘Sieg Heil’ salute with a piece of pizza in his hand…. If you laugh at something, you take its power away. But there are certain things we are still unable to laugh about.”50

Using Hitler to promote companies and products is a worldwide phenomenon. Conqueror Real Estate, a property firm in Dubai, stood by its national campaign in the United Arab Emirates. The advertisement featured Hitler next to the tagline: “Conqueror, The World Is Yours.” The general manager of the company said: “I’m making business, I don’t have a political opinion. He’s a famous person-bad or good, I don’t care-and I want to attract the attention of readers. And yesterday we had a lot of response. We had complaints, but it was one of the busiest days of the year, too, so it has an effect.”51

Jewish Trivialization of the Holocaust

Some Jews also trivialize the Holocaust. Problems currently facing the Jewish people cannot be compared to the mass murder of six million. An article by Ohr Sameach, a Jerusalem-based Jewish outreach organization, calls the assimilation of Jews “the holocaust of assimilation.”52 But the voluntary loss of Jewish practices is very remote from an imposed genocide.

Uri Orbach, a well-known Israeli religious journalist, referred to the problem of Jewish intermarriage as the “‘White Holocaust’ or ‘Silent Holocaust,’ the one that annually takes away many thousands of Jews who chose to intermarry.”53 Once again mixed marriages are a free choice and part of a process that has nothing of the cruelty of murdering helpless Jews because of their identity.

Sarah Silverman, an American Jewish comedian, regularly jokes about the Holocaust. She mentions a Holocaust-survivor grandmother “who went to one of the ‘better’ concentration camps and got a tattoo that read ‘bedazzled.'”54

Conclusion

The above examples demonstrate that trivialization occurs in many and varied situations. They show that, contrary to most other distortions of the Holocaust, the trivializers usually do not target Jews.

Holocaust trivialization very often selects a single element that somewhat resembles a component of the Holocaust as the basis of its abusive comparison. The essence of the distortion is that there are so many cruel elements of the Holocaust with which the compared phenomenon has no similarity.

As Holocaust trivialization is almost always based on a superficial use of comparisons, those who confront the trivializers limit themselves to ad hoc refutations of their claims or demands to stop commercialization and other abuses. Often this leads to apologies by those responsible.

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Publication of this issue was made possible in part by the support of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany (Rabbi Israel Miller Fund for Shoah Research, Documentation and Education) for the JCPA program on Contemporary Holocaust Distortion

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Notes

* Mikael Tossavainen’s comments as this text was in preparation are greatly appreciated. Many thanks are due to Miriam Mandl and Rena Garschowitz for their assistance in researching this essay.

Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld is Chairman of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He is an international business strategist who has been a consultant to governments, international agencies, and boards of some of the world’s largest corporations. Among the twelve books he has published are Europe’s Crumbling Myths: The Post-Holocaust Origins of Today’s Anti-Semitism (JCPA, Yad Vashem, WJC, 2003) and Academics against Israel and the Jews (JCPA, 2007).

About Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld

Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld is emeritus chairman (2000-2012) of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. The author was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, and the International Leadership Award by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. His latest book is The War of a Million Cuts: The Struggle against the Delegitimization of Israel and the Jews, and the Growth of New Anti-Semitism (2015). His previous books include Europe’s Crumbling Myths: The Post-Holocaust Origins of Today’s Anti-Semitism; Judging the Netherlands: The Renewed Holocaust Restitution Process, 1997-2000; and The Abuse of Holocaust Memory: Distortions and Responses.